In a way, the world-view of the party imposed
itself most successfully on the people incapable of understanding
it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of
reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what
was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in
public events to notice what was happening. By lack of
understanding, they remained sane. They simply swallowed
everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it
left no residue behind, just like a grain of corn will pass
undigested through the body of a bird.—George
Orwell, 1984

(Excerpt from Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of
Revolutionary Change)

NEW ECOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDINGS

CIRCUMSTANCE: The Age of Exuberance is over, population
has already overshot carrying capacity, and prodigal Homo sapiens
has drawn down the world's savings deposits.

CONSEQUENCE: All forms of human organization and
behavior that are based on the assumption of limitlessness must
change to forms that accord with finite limits.

ADAPTATIONS

CIRCUMSTANCE

CONSEQUENCE

BEHAVIOR

Some people recognize that the New World is old
and that major change must follow.

ACCEPTED

ACCEPTED

REALISM

Some people have faith that technological
progress will stave off major institutional change.

ACCEPTED

DISREGARDED

CARGOISM

Some people have faith that family planning,
recycling centers, and anti-pollution laws will keep the New
World new.

DISREGARDED

PARTIALLY
ACCEPTED

COSMETICISM

Some people do not believe that the New
World's newness once did, or that its oldness now does, have
any significance.

DISREGARDED

DISREGARDED

CYNICISM

Some people insist that the assumption of
limitlessness was and still is valid.

DENIED

DENIED

OSTRICHISM

Industrialization: Prelude to Collapse
by William Catton

(Excerpt from Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of
Revolutionary Change)

Unrecognized Preview

The Industrial Revolution made us precariously dependent on
nature's dwindling legacy of non-renewable resources, even
though we did not at first recognize this fact. Many major events
of modern history were unforeseen results of actions taken with
inadequate awareness of ecological mechanisms. Peoples and
governments never intended some of the outcomes their actions
would incur.

To see where we are now headed, when our destiny has departed
so radically from our aspirations, we must examine some historic
indices that point to the conclusion that even the concept of
succession (as explored in previous chapters) understates the
ultimate consequences of our own exuberance. We can begin by
taking a fresh look at the Great Depression of the 1930s, an
episode people saw largely in the shallower terms of economics
and politics when they were living through it. [1] From an
ecologically informed perspective, what else can we now see in
it?

The Great Depression, looked at ecologically, was a preview of
the fate toward which mankind has been drawn by the kinds of
progress that have depended on consuming exhaustible resources.
We need to see why it was not recognized for the preview it was;
this will help us to grasp at last the meaning missed
earlier.

We did not know we were watching a preview because, when the
world economy fell apart in 1929-32, it was not from exhaustion
of essential fuels or materials. From the very definition of
carrying capacity—the maximum indefinitely
supportable ecological load—we can now see that
non-renewable resources provide no real carrying capacity;
they provide only phantom carrying capacity. If coming to depend
on phantom carrying capacity is a Faustian bargain that mortgages
the future of Homo colossus as the price of an exuberant
present, that mortgage was not yet being foreclosed in the
Great Depression. Even so, much of the suffering that befell so
much of mankind in the 1930s does need to be seen as the result
of a carrying capacity deficit. The fact that the deficit did not
stem from resource exhaustion in that instance makes it no less
indicative of the kinds of grief entailed by resource depletion.
Accordingly, we need to understand what did bring on a carrying
capacity deficit in the 1930s.

Carrying Capacity and Liebig's Law

To attain such an understanding we need to step outside the
usual economic or political frames of thought, go back two-thirds
of a century before the 1929 crash, and reexamine for its
profound human relevance a principle of agricultural chemistry
formulated in 1863 by a German scientist, Justus von Liebig. [2]
That principle set forth with great clarity the concept of the
"limiting factor" briefly mentioned in Chapter 8.
Carrying capacity is, as we saw there, limited not just by food
supply, but potentially by any substance or circumstance that is
indispensable but inadequate. The fundamental principle is this:
whatever necessity is least abundantly available (relative to per
capita requirements) sets an environment's carrying
capacity.

While there is no way to repeal this principle, which is known
as "the law of the minimum," or Liebig's law, there
is a way to make its application less restrictive. People living
in an environment where carrying capacity is limited by a
shortage of one essential resource can develop exchange
relationships with residents of another area that happens to be
blessed with a surplus of that resource but happens to lack some
other resource that is plentiful where the first one was
scarce.

Trade does not repeal Liebig's law. Only by knowing
Liebig's law, however, can we see clearly what trade does do,
in ecological terms. Trade enlarges the scope of application of
the law of the minimum. The composite carrying capacity of two or
more areas with different resource configurations can be greater
than the sum of their separate carrying capacities. Call this the
principle of scope enlargement; it can be expressed in
mathematical notation as follows:

CC (A + B) > CCA + CCB

The combined environment (A + B) still has finite carrying
capacity, and that carrying capacity is still set by the
necessary resource available in least (composite) abundance. But
if the two environments are truly joined, by trade, then
scarcities that are local to A or B no longer have to be
limiting.

A good many of the events of human history need to be seen as
efforts to implement the principle of scope enlargement. Most
such events came about as results of decisions and activities by
men who never heard of Liebig or his law of the minimum. Now,
however, knowing the law, and understanding also the
scope-enlargement principle, we can see important processes of
history in a new light. Progress in transport technology,
together with advancements in the organization of commerce, often
achieved only after conquest or political consolidation, have had
the effect of enlarging the world's human carrying capacity
by enabling more and more local populations (or their lifestyles)
to be limited not by local scarcity, but by abundance at a
distance.

Vulnerability to Scope Reduction

As human numbers (and appetites) grew in response to this
exchange-based enlargement of composite carrying capacity,
continued access to non-local resources became increasingly vital
to human well-being and survival. As the ecological load
increased beyond what could have been supported by the sum of the
separate carrying capacities of the formerly insulated local
environments, mankind's vulnerability to any disruption of
trade became more and more critical. The aftermath of the crash
of 1929 demonstrated that vulnerability.

Unfortunately, modern transport systems, and some aspects of
modern organization, are based very heavily upon exhaustible
resource exploitation. Insofar as this is true, they must
eventually founder upon the rocks of resource exhaustion. But
even before they might succumb to such physical disaster, the
trade arrangements upon which the earth's extended carrying
capacity for Homo colossus has come to depend can be torn
apart by social catastrophe. [3] It is important to
recognize at last that that is what happened in 1929-32. In fact,
some of it began happening during, or as a repercussion of the
Great War of 1914-18.

World War I disrupted relationships between the various
peoples of Europe and between Europe, the New World, and the
Orient. It also resulted in reallocation of the still colonial
parts of the world among the various imperial powers seeking to
exploit them as ghost acreage. Not all aspects of these changes
wrought by the war would have reduced the scope of application of
Liebig's law, but some certainly did, for some peoples, to
some extent.

In the case of defeated Germany, access to resources from
outside German territory was cut off. At the same time, the
staggering requirement of reparations payments to the victorious
Allies aggravated the load to be borne by Germany's limited
indigenous carrying capacity. Even internally, Germany suffered
as inflation shattered the vital exchange relations between its
diverse localities and between the occupational categories
(quasi-species) into which its culturally advanced population had
become differentiated. [4] Destruction of the value of currency
meant destruction of the medium of mutualism; as
inter-occupational symbiosis crumbled, hardship was rampant.

The astronomical German inflation was thus no mere fluke of
history. Rather, it was a preview of the larger preview to come,
when other forms of financial disruption would rend the fabric of
trade throughout the world. By thus compelling a reduction of the
scope of application of Liebig's law back down to local
resource bases, such trade dislocation would convert existing
loads of human resource-consumers, previously supportable by
composite carrying capacity, into overloads no longer fully
supportable by fragmented carrying capacities.

In America in the 1920s, after a brief post-war depression, a
period of neo-exuberance set in, leading in the later years of
the decade to such an expectation of perpetual progress
and prosperity that some people found they could prosper from the
expectation itself. "Speculation" in the stock market
became the expected way to get rich. [5] Inhibitions against
speculation were relaxed; people supposed the American prototype
democracy, having enabled the Allies finally to triumph over
Kaiser Germany, had made the world safe for getting rich and had
established the right of everyone to try to do so.

The essential contrast between speculation and genuine
investment is this: speculators buy stock not for the purpose of
acquiring claims on future dividends from the business in which
they acquire shares, but for the purpose of profiting from the
expected escalation in their stock's resale value. When
nearly all buyers are speculators, then virtually the only value
of their shares is the resale value. Stock prices continue to
escalate under such circumstances only as long as virtually
everyone expects resale values to continue rising, and are thus
willing to buy. The fact that prices may already grossly
exaggerate a stock's intrinsic (dividend-paying) worth simply
ceases to concern the speculator during the time when price
escalation is confidently expected to continue. Breakdown of that
faith, however, turns the process around. Anticipation of
inexorable enrichment gives way to fear of ruin as self-induced
price escalation turns into self-induced price decline. Panic, in
the stock market sense, means the competitive drive to sell
before falling prices fall farther—which drives prices
down.

What connected the 1929 Wall Street crash to Liebig's law
was the fact that so much speculative buying had been done with
borrowed money. Collapse in the "value" of stocks thus
led to an epidemic of bank failures, because the banks were
unable to retrieve the funds they had lent to the speculators.
Stock certificates taken in by the banks as security from
borrowers were worth much less money after the crash than the
number of dollars borrowed on them before the crash. When banks
failed, depositors with accounts in those banks suddenly found
themselves shorn of the purchasing power formerly signified by
their bankbook entries. As depositors went broke, they ceased
being able to buy goods or hire employees. Sellers of whatever
they would have bought, or workers they would have employed, were
therefore also suddenly bereft of revenue sources. In a society
with elaborate division of labor and a money economy, a
"revenue source" is the magic key that provides access
to carrying capacity. Collapse of fiscal webs thus confronted
millions of people with loss of access to carrying capacity, as
truly as if purchasable resources had actually ceased to exist.
Nations whose citizens had increasingly become masters of one
trade apiece and jacks of few others found themselves suddenly
unable to rely on composite carrying capacity drawn from a
nonlocal environment. What I have called the "medium of
mutualism" was no longer functioning, so the scope of
application of Liebig's law of the minimum was being
constricted once again to local (or personal) resources.

There was not in those days any Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation to back up the solvency of an individual bank when it
suffered a "run" by its depositors. The failure of bank
after bank in a time when banks had no institutionalized way of
pooling their assets for mutual protection can thus be seen as a
fiscal instance of the hazards of scope reduction. Had bankers
understood that an ecological principle formulated by an
agricultural chemist could apply to the world of finance, perhaps
something like the FDIC would have been invented sooner.

The fiscal collapse had an even more important implication
than this for our ecological understanding of the human
predicament. That implication appears in the generalized
Depression that followed. Consider the farm population in
America. Like almost everyone else, farm families were compelled,
by the repercussions of bank failures and the ramifications of
general panic, to cut their consumer expenditures. Farmers also
often had to allow their land, their buildings, and their
equipment to deteriorate for lack of money to pay for maintenance
and repairs. Many farms were encumbered by
mortgages—mortgages which were foreclosed by banks that now
desperately needed the payments farmers could not afford to make.
(Bank failures were even more common in rural regions than in
major cities.) In spite of all these difficulties, however, the
farm population in America ceased declining (as it had been
doing) and increased between 1929 and 1933 by more than a
million. The long-term trend of movement out of farm niches and
into urban niches was reversed during the Great Depression.
[6]

Niches everywhere were being constricted by the Depression.
However, the urbanizing trend that had been occurring as a result
of industrial growth in the cities and from elimination of farm
niches by mechanization of agriculture was disrupted by this
economic breakdown. At the heart of the reversal was a simple
fact: the nature of' farming in the 1930s was still such
that, whatever else they had to give up, there was still truth in
the cliche that "the farm family can always eat." Other
(non-flood-producing) occupational groups that now had to fall
back (like the farmers) on carrying capacities of reduced scope
could find themselves in much more dire straits.

If we read it rightly, then, we can see the differential
impact of the Depression upon farm versus non-farm populations as
a cogent indicator of the dependence of the total population on
previously achieved enlargements of the scope of application
of' Liebig's law With breakdown of the mechanisms of
exchange, various segments of a modern nation had to revert as
best they could to living on carrying capacities again limited by
locally least abundant resources, rather than extended by access
to less scarce resources from elsewhere. Although scope reduction
hurt everyone, rural folk had local resources to fall back upon;
urban people, in contrast, had so detached themselves as to have
almost ceased to recognize the indispensability of those
resources. For reasons we shall examine in a moment, economic
hard times hit the farms sooner than they hit the cities, but in
the final scope-reducing crunch the farmers turned out to have an
advantage sufficient to interrupt a clear trend of
urbanization.

No Fairy Godmother

The Depression also interrupted the advance of
industrialization and its attendant occupational diversification
of the population. With hindsight, that interruption becomes an
opportunity to bring the previous diversification into ecological
focus.

An ecological perspective enables us to see pressure toward
niche diversification as the natural result of the overfilling of
existing niches. Among non-human organisms, this pressure leads
eventually to the emergence of new species. Among humans it leads
through sociocultural processes to the emergence of new
occupations (quasispecies), which, as we noted in Chapter 6, had
been made clear by Emile Durkheim as long ago as 1893. To bring
Durkheim's analysis and the ecological perspective to bear
upon the Great Depression, however, we must take into account the
fact that nature is no Fairy Godmother and provides no guarantee
that new niches will automatically be already available at the
right time and in the right quantity to absorb immediately the
surplus population from overfilled previous niches. Nor does
nature guarantee pre-adaptation of the surplus individuals to
whatever new niches do become available.

In nature, overfilling of old niches can result in massive
death. Many organisms fall by the wayside in the march of
speciation. Among human organisms the principles hold, but
the process is moderated because humans are occupationally
differentiated by social processes rather than by biological
processes. Ostensibly, when old niches become obsolete, we can
retrain ourselves for new roles. So, for Homo sapiens,
overpopulation and death are avoidable results of niche
saturation. The avoidance is not easy, however, and retraining
for new niches can be traumatic.

An ecological perspective thus heightens the significance of a
classic sociological study that clearly showed how unlikely it
is, even among members of the relatively flexible and plastic
human species, that re-adaptation to new niches (as old ones
close up) will occur easily or automatically. Between 1908 and
1918, W. I. Thomas at the University of Chicago analyzed
mountains of documentary data on the experience of Polish
immigrants in America. [7] The people he studied had come to the
New World after absorbing the folkways of their native Poland. In
America they were faced with the necessity of adapting to
unfamiliar circumstances. Thomas found that old ways of behaving
and thinking were not easily abandoned or changed. New ways were
learned only with difficulty when they contradicted the
migrants' old-country upbringing. Thomas generalized from the
immigrants' situation to say something about social change in
broader contexts. He concluded that an accustomed way of behaving
tends to persist as long as circumstances allow. When
circumstances change, making familiar and comfortable ways
unworkable (or unacceptable), a degree of crisis is inevitable.
Re-adaptation hurts. It is resisted. [8]

We know now that the change that makes re-adaptation necessary
need not be relocation. Any event that makes old ways unworkable
and new ways mandatory can provoke the trauma of reorientation.
Conflict and tension are natural accompaniments of change; they
tend to continue until some new modus vivendi is worked
out. The new form of adaptation will typically combine some
elements of the old with some features imposed by the changed
circumstances.

"Culture shock" became a familiar term for denoting
the enervating disorientation and bewilderment associated with
movement into unfamiliar societal contexts. Even a casual tourist
can feel it when he travels abroad. Half a century after the
phenomenon was studied by W. I. Thomas among Polish peasants
resettled in America, Alvin Toffler coined and popularized
another phrase that extended the concept. "Future
shock" was his apt new term; forced adjustment to new
ways can be as traumatic as forced adjustment to foreign
ways. [9]

People in a post-exuberant world found themselves surrounded
by alien conditions. They underwent a great deal of future shock,
years before they got that name for it. By mechanization of
agriculture in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the
Western world greatly reduced the number of farm workers needed
to provide sustenance for themselves and for urban dwellers.
Displaced from agricultural occupations, ax-farmers naturally
migrated into cities in search of alternative employment,
employment for which their farming experience or upbringing had
not prepared them. Industrial expansion connected with World War
I took up the slack temporarily, making employable on an
emergency basis many persons who would otherwise have been passed
over as unprepared for a given job. The war also helped hasten
the mechanization of agriculture that was creating the displaced
farm-worker surplus. After the war, urbanization and the
proliferation of industrial occupations could not altogether keep
pace with the continuing displacement of workers from the farming
sector. There continued to be more farmers than were needed, so
the agricultural portion of the economy was beset with
"overproduction." This depressed farm
prices—several years before the Wall Street crash provided
the impetus that depressed prices for everyone. The resulting
loss of purchasing power by the farming population helped
depress, in turn, the urban-industrial sectors of the world's
economy.

Ecological difficulties were aggravated, of course, by human
errors—the glibly confident indulgence in speculation in
1928 being one example. But the causal importance of some human
errors was easily overestimated. Amid the economic and political
events of 1929-32 it was plausible for Americans, unaware of the
ecological basis for what was happening, to see all the
difficulties of that difficult time as products merely of the
failures of the Hoover administration. This attractive
oversimplification neglected one fact that should have been
obvious: many other nations, over which Mr. Hoover did not
preside, were undergoing the same calamity.

For those of radical inclination, it seemed plausible (in the
absence of an ecological paradigm) to attribute the dire
situation to a failure of "the capitalist system." But
socialists believed as ardently as capitalists in the myth of
limitlessness. In spite of socialists' commitment to
production for use rather than for profit, they were not then
(and have not been since) any more cautious than capitalists
about adopting the drawdown method. They assumed that
socialist-sponsored versions of drawdown could somehow eliminate
such "capitalist contradictions" as simultaneous
overproduction and abject poverty. They remained just as
unconcerned as the capitalists about overshoot. [10]

Conservatives, on the other hand, who were not necessarily
misanthropes, found it plausible to whistle in the dark,
insisting that prosperity would automatically return if we just
waited for the system to adjust itself. They were the Ostriches
of their time, holders of the Type V attitude (delineated in
Chapter 4). They believed nothing essential had changed from the
Age of Exuberance.

Roosevelt was elected to replace Hoover, new approaches were
put rapidly into practice, and a discouraged nation took heart.
But full economic recovery continued to elude even the New Deal
until preparation for World War II began to spur massive
industrial activity—with even more than the usual disregard
for long-range drawdown costs.

Economic recovery under the New Deal was not unique. Nazi
Germany also overcame its depression, reducing unemployment in
the first four years under Hitler from six million to one
million. (People outside Germany did not automatically interpret
this achievement as validation of Nazi tactics.) Under the Nazi
method, millions of the unemployed could be employed as soldiers,
and millions more could be compulsorily retrained and
given niches as producers of military hardware. The war economy
nurtured demand for consumer goods for the soldiers and for these
re-employed makers of military materiel; furthermore, it provided
"the correct psychological atmosphere," enabling the
civilian sector to accept painful re-adaptation.

War psychology overcame natural human resistance to departure
from custom. [11] The war also used elaborate technology and drew
down the world's stocks of natural resources.

In the United States, wartime economic recovery supposedly
proved that New Deal "pump priming" by fiscal deficits
had been the right kind of response to a stagnant economy, except
that it could not be done in adequate volume until the need to
re-arm rapidly for all-out war made truly massive red-ink budgets
politically acceptable. But American recovery from the depression
of the 1930s did not unambiguously validate the Keynesian
economic theory implicit in Roosevelt's approach.

In either the German or the American portion of the Great
Depression, an economic interpretation (by minds unaccustomed to
an ecological perspective) enabled us to miss the point. Very
simply, the ecological paradigm enables these events to be read
as follows: Expansion of the military establishment, at the cost
of additional resource drawdown, suddenly provided new niches (in
industry and in the armed forces) capable of absorbing the
overflow from the whole array of saturated civilian occupations.
And the wartime social climate provided the patriotic push that
made the trauma of re-adaptation to new occupational roles
endurable. The new or enlarged military-industrial niches had
been previously either non-existent or under serious stigma. What
was important, ecologically speaking, was the fact that
previously existent and acceptable niches had been
saturated; there were people to spare—in America
because of technological progress and population growth; in
Germany because of the debacle of World War I and its aftermath,
which left the German economy, occupational structure, and
national morale in a shambles. Moreover, human redundancy
throughout much of the world had become manifest when, in various
ways and in various places, the medium of mutualism came apart,
leaving everyone to cope with carrying capacity limits set by
local minimums.

In the American case, the fiscal deficits run up during World
War II were merely the ledger-book picture of the change that
eased the problem, not the cause of that change. Red ink
didn't re-employ the unemployed. The growing national debt
(expressed in money) was a fiction of accountancy, a fiction that
enabled Americans to believe that wartime drawdown of the
once-New World's resource reservoir only constituted
"borrowing from ourselves," rather than stealing from
the future. The reality of diachronic competition remained
unacknowledged. Nevertheless, resources used up in World War II
were made unavailable for use by posterity.

Circular versus Linear Ecosystems

Whatever the origins of human redundancy, and whatever the
sequel to it, we needed to see (but were not seeing) that what
had happened to us between the wars, and especially what happened
to us since World War II, had not resulted merely from politics
or economics in the conventional sense. The events of this period
had simply accelerated a fate that began to overtake us centuries
ago. The population explosion after 1945 and the explosive
increase of technology during and after the war were only the
most recent means of that acceleration.

Human communities once relied almost entirely on organic
sources of energy—plant fuels and animal
musclepower—supplemented very modestly by the equally
renewable energy of moving air and flowing water. All of these
energy sources were derived from ongoing solar income. As long as
man's activities were based on them, this was, as church men
said, "world without end." That phrase should never
have been construed to mean "world without limit," for
supplies can be perpetual without being infinite.

Locally, green pastures might become overgrazed, and still
waters might be overused. Local environmental changes through the
centuries might compel human communities to migrate. As long as
resources available somewhere were sufficient to sustain
the human population then in existence, the implication of
Liebig's law was that carrying capacity (globally) had not
yet been overshot. If man was then living within the earth's
current income, it was not from wisdom, but from ignorance of the
buried treasure yet to be discovered.

Then the earth's savings, and new ways to use them, began
to be discovered. Mankind became committed to the fatal error of
supposing that life could thenceforth be lived on a scale and at
a pace commensurate with the rate at which treasure was
discovered and unearthed. Drawing down stocks of exhaustible
resources would not have seemed significantly different from
drawing upon carrying capacity imports, at a time when nobody yet
knew Liebig's law, or the principle of scope enlargement, or
the distinction between real and phantom carrying capacity, or
the various categories of ghost acreage.

Homo sapiens mistook the rate of withdrawal of savings
deposits for a rise in income. No regard for the total size of
the legacy, or for the rate at which nature might still be
storing carbon away, seemed necessary. Homo sapiens set
about becoming Homo colossus without wondering if the
transformation would have to be quite temporary. (Later, our
pre-ecological misunderstanding of what was being done to our
future was epitomized by that venerable loophole in the corporate
tax laws of the United States, the oil depletion allowance. This
measure permitted oil "producers" to offset their
taxable revenues by a generous percentage, on the pretext that
their earnings reflected depletion of "their" crude oil
reserves. Even though nature, not the oil companies, had put the
oil into the earth, this tax write-off was rationalized as an
incentive to "production." Since "production"
really meant extraction, this was like running a bank with
rules that called for paying interest on each withdrawal of
savings, rather than on the principal left in the bank. It was,
in short, a government subsidy for stealing from the future.)

The essence of the drawdown method is this: man began to spend
nature's legacy as if it were income. Temporarily this made
possible a dramatic increase in the quantity of energy per capita
per year by which Homo colossus could do the things he
wanted to do. This increase led, among other things, to reduced
manpower requirements in agriculture. It also led to the
development of many new occupational niches for increasingly
diversified human beings. (Expansion of niches in Germany,
America, and elsewhere from 1933 to 1945 was, it now appears,
just a brief episode in this long-run development.) Because the
new niches depended on spending the withdrawn savings, they were
niches in what amounted to a "detritus ecosystem."
Detritus, or an accumulation of dead organic matter, is
nature's own version of ghost acreage. [12]

Detritus ecosystems are not uncommon. When nutrients from
decaying autumn leaves on land are carried by runoff from melting
snows into a pond, their consumption by algae in the pond may be
checked until springtime by the low winter temperatures that keep
the algae from growing. When warm weather arrives, the inflow of
nutrients may already be largely complete for the year. The algal
population, unable to plan ahead, explodes in the halcyon days of
spring in an irruption or bloom that soon exhausts the finite
legacy of sustenance materials. This algal Age of Exuberance
lasts only a few weeks. Long before the seasonal cycle can bring
in more detritus, there is a massive die-off of these innocently
incautious and exuberant organisms. Their "age of
overpopulation" is very brief, and its sequel is swift and
inescapable.

When the fossil fuel legacy upon which Homo colossus
was going to thrive for a time became seriously depleted, the
human niches based on burning that legacy would collapse, just as
detritovore niches collapse when the detritus is exhausted. For
humans, the social ramifications of that collapse were unpleasant
to contemplate. The Great Depression was, as we have seen, a mild
preview. Detritus ecosystems flourish and collapse because they
lack the life-sustaining biogeochemical circularity of other
kinds of ecosystems. They are nature's own version of
communities that prosper briefly by the drawdown method.

The phrase "detritus ecosystem" was, of course, not
widely familiar. The fact that "bloom" and
"crash" cycles were common among organisms that depend
on exhaustible accumulations of dead organic matter for their
sustenance was not widely known. It is therefore understandable
that people welcomed ways of becoming colossal, not recognizing
as a kind of detritus the transformed organic remains called
"fossil fuels," and not noticing that Homo
colossus was in fact a detritovore, subject to the risk of
crashing as a consequence of blooming.

Bloom and crash constitute a special kind of sere; certain
kinds of populations in certain kinds of circumstances typically
experience these two seral stages—irruption followed by
die-off. Crash can be thought of as an abrupt instance of
"succession with no apparent successor." As in ordinary
succession, the biotic community has changed its habitat by using
it, and has become (much) less viable in the changed environment.
If, after the crash, the environment can recover from the
resource depletion inflicted by an irrupting species, then a new
increase of numbers may occur and make that species "its own
successor." Hence there are cycles of irruption and die-off
(among species as different as rodents, insects, algae). Our own
species' uniqueness cannot be counted upon as protection.
Moreover, some of the resources we use cannot recover. [13]

When yeast cells are introduced into a wine vat, as noted in
Chapter 6, they find their "New World" (the moist,
sugar-laden fruit mash) abundantly endowed with the resources
they need for exuberant growth. But as their population responds
explosively to this magnificent circumstance, the accumulation of
their own fermentation products makes life increasingly
difficult—and, if we indulge in a little anthropomorphic
thinking about their plight, miserable. Eventually, the
microscopic inhabitants of this artificially prepared detritus
ecosystem all die. To be anthropomorphic again, the coroner's
reports would have to say that they died of self-inflicted
pollution: the fermentation products.

Nature treated human beings as winemakers treat the yeast
cells, by endowing our world (especially Europe's New World)
with abundant but exhaustible resources. People promptly
responded to this circumstance as the yeast cells respond to the
conditions they find when put into the wine vat.

When the earth's deposits of fossil fuels and mineral
resources were being laid down, Homo sapiens had not yet
been prepared by evolution to take advantage of them. As soon as
technology made it possible for mankind to do so, people eagerly
(and without foreseeing the ultimate consequences) shifted to a
high-energy way of life. Man became, in effect, a detritovore,
Homo colossus. Our species bloomed, and now we must expect
crash (of some sort) as the natural sequel. What form our crash
may take remains to be considered in the concluding section.

One thing that kept us from seeing all this, and enabled us to
rush exuberantly into niches that had to be temporary, was our
ability to give ideological legitimation to occupations that made
no sense ecologically. When General Eisenhower, as retiring
president, warned the American people to beware of unwarranted
influence wielded by the military-industrial complex, [14] it was
presumably political and economic influence that he had in mind.
But the military-industrial complex was a vast conglomeration of
occupational niches. As such, it wielded an altogether different
(and even more insidious) kind of influence. The
military-industrial complex helped perpetuate the illusion that
we still had a carrying capacity surplus; it made it profitable
for the living generation to extract and use up natural resources
that might otherwise have been left for posterity. It absorbed
for a while most of the excess labor force displaced by
technological progress from older occupational niches that had
been less dependent on drawing down reservoirs of exhaustible
resources. It thus helped us believe that the Age of Exuberance
could go on.

Nor was General Eisenhower alone in missing the ecological
significance and over-emphasizing the political elements in the
trends of' his time. His young, articulate, and sophisticated
Bostonian successor launched a new administration with an
inaugural address whose inspirational quality lay partly in its
eloquent resolution of American ambivalence. If we wanted to
maintain full employment, we dreaded achieving it by means of an
arms race. Subtly, and with the gloss of' high idealism, John
F. Kennedy reassured the nationwide television audience on that
crisp, brilliant January day in 1961 that the temporary
occupational niches of the military-industrial complex could be
long-lasting and could be made more honorable than horrible.
There was to be a "new Alliance for Progress," and we
were to hope for emancipation from the "uncertain balance of
terror that stays the hand of' mankind's final war."
But the conflict-bred niches would last, for "the trumpet
summons us again . . . to bear the burden of a long twilight
struggle year in and year out . . . against the common enemies of
man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself." [15] Under
both parties, the military-industrial complex enabled us to be
preoccupied with matters that helped us ignore resource limits.
It helped thereby to obscure the fact that population was
expanding to fill niches that could not be permanent because they
were founded upon drawing down prehistoric savings, exhaustible
fossil energy stocks.

The human family, even if it were soon to stop growing, had
committed itself to living beyond its means. Homo sapiens,
as we saw in Chapter 9, was capable of transforming himself into
new "quasi-species." By the Industrial Revolution
humans had turned themselves into "detritovores,"
dependent on ravenous consumption of long-since accumulated
organic remains, especially petroleum.

If we were to understand what was now happening to us and to
our world, we had to learn to see recent history as a crescendo
of human prodigality. When American birth rates declined as the
1960s gave way to the 1970s, this did not mean we were escaping
the predicament of the algae any more than the ringing words of
President Kennedy's inaugural address had really meant that
we could eat our cake and still have it. Rather, something had
happened that was fundamental, and that could not be undone by
brilliant rhetoric: there had been a marked acceleration in our
previously begun shift from a self-perpetuating way of life that
relied on the circularity of natural biogeochemical processes, to
a way of life that was ultimately self-terminating because it
relied on linear chemical transformations. They were linear (and
one way) because man was using (with the aid of his prosthetic
equipment) so many non-crop substances. Man was no longer engaged
in a balanced system of symbiotic relations with other species.
When man degraded the habitat, it tended to stay degraded; it was
not being rehabilitated by other organisms with different
biochemical needs.

Perils of Prodigality: The Coming Crash

Man does not live on detritus alone. Misled by our prodigal
expenditures of savings, we allowed the human family to multiply
so much that by the 1970s mankind had taken over for human use
about one eighth of the annual total net production of
organic matter by contemporary photosynthesis in all the
vegetation on all the earth's land. That much was being used
by man and his domestic animals. [16] It would require taking
over more than the other seven-eighths to provide from organic
sources the vast quantities of energy we were deriving from
fossil fuels to run our mechanized civilization, even if economic
growth and human increase were halted by the year 2000. Thus, as
we began to see in Chapter 3, we were already well beyond the
size that would permit us to re-adapt (without severe
depopulation) to a sustained yield way of life when our access to
savings gave out. On the other hand, just three more doublings of
population (scarcely more than Britain had already experienced in
the short time since Malthus) would mean that all the net
photosynthetic production on all the continents and all the
islands on earth would have to be used for supporting the human
community. Then our descendants would be condemned to living at
an abjectly "underdeveloped" level, if no fossil
acreage remained available to sustain modern industry.

Such total exploitation of an ecosystem by one dominant
species has seldom happened, except among species which bloom and
crash. Detritovores provide clear examples, but there are others,
and we shall take a close look at some of them in the final
chapter. For Homo sapiens, it was unlikely that we could
even divert much more than the already unprecedented fraction of
the total photosynthesis to our uses.

It was thus becoming apparent that nature must, in the not far
distant future, institute bankruptcy proceedings against
industrial civilization, and perhaps against the standing crop of
human flesh, just as nature had done many times to other
detritus-consuming species following their exuberant expansion in
response to the savings deposits their ecosystems had accumulated
before they got the opportunity to begin the drawdown.

It was not widely recognized, of course, but the imminence of
that kind of culmination really was why the United Nations had to
convene its 1972 Conference on the Human Environment. The
conference in Stockholm was meant to begin the process of
preventing our only earth from being rendered less and less
usable by humans. In short, its purpose was to arrest global
succession. Persons who had struggled valiantly to bring about
this conference had been engaged (in an important sense) in a
global counterpart of the efforts of Dr. Goodwin in Williamsburg.
But whereas he sought to undo succession in order to preserve
history, they sought to preserve a world ecosystem in which
Homo sapiens might remain the dominant species—and
might remain human.

Until the extent of the transformation of Homo sapiens
into Homo colossus was seen and the full ecological
ramifications of that transformation were more nearly understood,
however, it would hardly be recognized that the kind of world
ecosystem the United Nations was seeking to perpetuate was
already being superseded—by an ecosystem that, by its very
nature, compelled the dominant species to go on sawing off the
limb on which it was sitting. Having become a species of
superdetritovores, mankind was destined not merely for
succession, but for crash.

Unfortunately but inevitably, the Stockholm deliberations were
confused by the fact that the luckier nations which happened to
achieve industrial prodigality before the earth's savings
became depleted had already infected the other nations with an
insatiable desire to emulate that prodigality. The infection
preceded recognition of the depletion. The result of this sad
historical sequence was the pathetic quarrel over whether the
luxury we cannot afford is economic growth or environmental
preservation. Neither was a luxury; worse, neither was possible
on a global scale.

Excess numbers and ravenous technology had already brought
Homo colossus to an ecological impasse. The laudable
ability of delegations from 114 diverse nations to hammer out
compromise resolutions favoring both environmental protection
and economic development for all nations did not extricate
us from our predicament. Deft avoidance of political deadlock
once again preserved the illusion that cake could be both eaten
and saved. But illusion preserved was still illusion.

Man needed to realize how commonly populations of other
species have undergone the experience of resource bankruptcy. But
we humans have been experiencing a double irruption, confronting
us with an intensified version of the plight of such species. As
a biological type, Homo sapiens has been irrupting for
10,000 years, and especially the last 400. In addition, our
detritus-consuming tools have been irrupting for the last 200
years. It is conceivable that the inevitable die-off necessitated
by overshoot could apply more to Homo colossus than to
Homo sapiens. That is, resource demand might be brought
back within the limits of permanent carrying capacity by
shrinking ourselves to less colossal stature—by giving up a
lot of our prosthetic apparatus and the high style of living it
has made possible. This might seem, in principle, an alternative
to the more literal form of die-off, an abrupt increase in human
mortality. In practice, it runs afoul of several implications of
W. I. Thomas's finding about resistance to change. Accustomed
ways of behaving and thinking tend to persist; this is probably
as true of the detritovorous habits of Homo colossus as it
was true of earlier human folkways. Outbreaks of violence among
American motorists waiting in long queues to buy gasoline,
sputtering in stubborn non-recognition of the onset of the
twilight of the petroleum era, suggest that the people of
industrial societies who have learned to live in colossal fashion
will not easily relinquish their seven-league boots, their heated
homes, and their habit of living high on the food chain. As we
said, re-adaptation hurts. It will be resisted.

Moreover, habits of thought persist. As we shall see in
Chapter 11, people continue to advocate further technological
breakthroughs as the supposedly sure cure for carrying capacity
deficits. The very idea that technology caused overshoot, and
that it made us too colossal to endure, remains alien to too many
minds for"de-colossalization" to be a really feasible
alternative to literal die-off. There is a persistent drive to
apply remedies that aggravate the problem.

If any substantial fraction of the more colossal segments of
humanity did conscientiously give up part of their
resource-devouring extensions out of humane concern for their
less colossal brethren, there is no guarantee that this would
avert die-off. It might only postpone it, permitting human
numbers to continue increasing a bit longer, or less colossal
peoples to become a bit more colossal, before we crash all the
more resoundingly.

All this tends to be disregarded by advocates of a
"return to the simple life" as a gentle way out of the
human predicament. Blessed are the less prosthetic, for they
shall inherit the ravaged earth. Probably so, in the long run.
But some view the dark cloud of fuel depletion and purport to see
a silver lining already: individuals forced to abandon much of
their modern technology will then get by on smaller per capita
shares of the phantom carrying capacity upon which prosthetic man
has become so dependent. However, insofar as the high
agricultural yields upon which our irrupted population's life
depends can be attained only by means of energy
subsidies—by lavish application of synthetic fertilizers,
and by large-scale use of petroleum-powered machinery—the
dwindling fossil acreage will probably lower the output of
visible acreage. As we asked before, what happens when it becomes
necessary again to pull the plow with a team of horses instead of
a tractor, and a substantial fraction of the crop acreage that
now feeds humans has to be allocated again to growing feed for
draft animals (or biomass to produce tractor fuel when the
Carboniferous legacy is no longer cheaply available)? So much for
that silver lining.

It will spare us no grief to deny that Homo sapiens has
been irrupting. It will in no way ease the impact to deny that
crash must follow. We must seek our rays of hope in another way
altogether (as we shall do in Chapter 15).

Not Cleared for Takeoff

The "developed" nations have been widely regarded as
previews of the future condition of the
"underdeveloped" countries. It would have been more
accurate to reverse the picture, as perhaps the Stockholm
Conference began to do for its most perceptive participants and
observers.

It was one thing to be an underdeveloped nation in the
eighteenth century, when the world had no highly developed
nations. It is quite another thing today. When today's
developed nations were not yet industrialized and were just
approaching their takeoff point, the World had only
recently entered an exuberant phase which made takeoff possible.
European technology was just starting to harness (for a few
brilliant centuries) the energy stored in the earth during the
past several hundred million years, and the sparsely populated
New World had only recently become available for exuberant
settlement and exploitation. These conditions of exuberance no
longer prevail. The underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, and
Latin America in the twentieth century cannot realistically
expect to follow in the footsteps of the undeveloped nations of
eighteenth-century Europe. Most of today's underdeveloped
nations are destined never to become developed. Egalitarian
traditions will be forced to adjust to permanent inequality.

Hard as it might be for the people and leaders of
underdeveloped countries to face the fact, they are not alone in
finding it repugnant. The people and leaders of the affluent
societies have also resisted seeing it. Recognition that most of
the world's poor would necessarily stay poor would destroy
the comforting conviction of the world's privileged that
their good fortune ought to inspire the world's poor to
emulate them, not resent them.

Nature's limiting factors would not clear most
underdeveloped countries for takeoff. But now that people are so
numerous, it would be even worse if many did somehow take off.
Most men of good will have been unable so far to accept this
implication of the ecological facts. Some will no doubt
righteously denounce this book for analyzing the situation in
this unpalatable way, as if no fact could hurt us if we refused
to acknowledge its truth. But not only are there not enough of
the substances a developed human community must take from its
environment in the process of living to permit a world of four
billion people to be all developed; the capacity of the
world's oceans, continents, and atmosphere to absorb the
substances Homo colossus must put somewhere in the
process of living is limited. Even as a waste disposal site, the
world is finite.

Right into the 1970s we were misled by so bland a word as
"pollution" for this part of our predicament. We were
already suffering the plight of the yeast cells in the wine vat.
Accumulation of the noxious and toxic extrametabolites of
high-energy industrial civilization had become a world problem,
but no government could admit that it would turn into a world
disaster if the benefits of modern technology were bestowed as
abundantly upon everyone in the underdeveloped countries as they
already had been upon the average inhabitant of the overdeveloped
ones. Leaders everywhere had to pretend full development of the
whole world was their ultimate aim and was still on the agenda.
By such pretensions mankind remained locked into stealing from
the future.

Learning to Read the News

Viewing contemporary events from a pre-ecological paradigm, we
missed their significance. From an ecological paradigm we can see
that fewer members of the species Homo colossus than of
the species Homo sapiens can be supported by a finite
world. The more colossal we become, the greater the difference.
What we called "pollution," and regarded at first as
either a mere nuisance or an indication of the insensitivity of
industrial people to esthetic values, can now be recognized as a
signal from the ecosystem. If we had learned to call it
"habitat damage," we might have read it as a sign of
the danger inherent in becoming colossal. Even if the world were
not already overloaded by four billion members of the species
Homo sapiens, it does not have room for that many
consumers of resources and exuders of extrametabolites on the
scale of modern Homo colossus. In short, on a planet no
larger than ours, four billion human beings simply cannot all
turn into prosthetic giants.

As we move deeper into the post-exuberant age, one of the keen
insights of a passionately concerned and unusually popular
sociologist, C. Wright Mills, will become increasingly important
to us all. It was an insight by which he tried to help his
contemporaries read the news of their times perceptively. We will
need to be at least as perceptive to avoid misconstruing events
that will happen in the years to come.

Although the paradigm from which Mills wrote was
pre-ecological, in one of his most earnest books he transcended
archaic thoughtways enough to note that only sometimes and in
some places do men make history; in other times and places, the
minutiae of everyday life can add up to mere "fate."
Mills gave us an unusually clear definition of this important
word. Infinitesimal actions, if they are numerous and cumulative,
can become enormously consequential. Fate, he explained, is
shaping history when what happens to us was intended by no one
and was the summary outcome of innumerable small decisions about
other matters by innumerable people. [17]

In a world that will not accommodate four billion of us if we
all become colossal, it is both futile and dangerous to indulge
in resentment, as we shall be sorely tempted to do, blaming some
person or group whom we suppose must have intended whatever is
happening to happen. If we find ourselves beset with
circumstances we wish were vastly different, we need to keep in
mind that to a very large extent they have come about because of
things that were hopefully and innocently done in the past by
almost everyone in general, and not just by anyone in particular.
If we single out supposed perpetrators of our predicament, resort
to anger, and attempt to retaliate, the unforeseen outcomes of
our indignant acts will compound fate.

In precisely Mills's sense, the conversion of a marvelous
carrying capacity surplus into a competition-aggravating and
crash-inflicting deficit was a matter of fate. No compact group
of leaders ever decided knowingly to take incautious advantage of
enlargment of the scope of applicability of Liebig's law, or
subsequently to reduce that scope and leave a swollen load
inadequately supported. No one decided deliberately to terminate
the Age of Exuberance. No group of leaders conspired knowingly to
turn us into detritovores. Using the ecological paradigm to think
about human history, we can see instead that the end of
exuberance was the summary result of all our separate and
innocent decisions to have a baby, to trade a horse for a
tractor, to avoid illness by getting vaccinated, to move from a
farm to a city, to live in a heated home, to buy a family
automobile and not depend on public transit, to specialize,
exchange, and thereby prosper.

Notes

1. See the explanations offered by various analysts cited in
Patterson 1965, pp. 227-245.

2. For the original formulation of this principle, see Liebig
1863, p.207. Also see the sharpened statement of it on p. 5 in
the "Editor's Preface" to that volume. For
indications that Liebig had the principle in mind even before he
grasped its generality and fundamental significance, see his
earlier work, Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and
Physiology (London: Taylor & Walton, 1842), pp. 41, 43, 85,
127, 129, 130, 132, 139, 141-142, 159, 178. On the development of
Liebig's thinking about this and other ecological principles,
see Justus von Liebig, "An Autobiographical Sketch,"
trans. J. Campbell Brown Chemical News 63 (June 5 and 12, 1891):
265-267, 276-278; W. A. Shenstone, Justus von Liebig: His Life
and Work (New York: Macmillan, 1895); and Forest Ray Moulton,
ea., Liebig and After Liebig: A Century of Progress in
Agricultural Chemistry (Washington: American Association for the
Advancement of Science, 1942).

3. Cf. Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1976). Too often social limits are
unwisely cited as if to afford some basis for disregarding
environmental finiteness; social limits actually make finiteness
all the more salient. They do not make carrying capacity less
relevant to human affairs. The cliche which asserts "There
are no real shortages, only maldistribution" inverts the
significance of social limits. In comparison with biogeochemical
limits, social limits to growth include all the ways in which
human societies are prone to fall short of developing and
maintaining the optimum organization that would allow
Liebig's law to apply only on a thoroughly global scale, with
carrying capacity thus never limited by local shortages. Social
limits, in other words, tend to aggravate, not alleviate, the
problems posed by biogcochemical limits.

4. See William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), pp. 61-62 In thinking about
the human implications of the law of the minimum and the social
impediments to implementing the principle of scope enlargement,
it is well to remember that, when the collapse occurred in
Germany, one ramification was the opportunity it afforded for
rise of the Nazi dictatorship, with grave consequences for many
other nations.

10. Cf. Ehrenfeld 1978 (listed among references for Ch. 1),
pp. 249-254. For recent examples of socialist persistence in the
myth of limitlessness, see Stanley Aronowitz, Food, Shelter and
the American Dream (New York: Seabury Press, 1974); Hugh
Stretton, Capitalism, Socialism and the Environment (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1976). Also see Irving Louis
Horowitz, Three Worlds of Development: The Theory and Practice of
International Stratification, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1972), p. xvi, where
"overdevelopment" is defined without any ecological
reference as "an excess ratio of industrial capacity to
social utility," i.e., to the ability of people with
existing organization, skill levels, etc., to benefit from
industrial output. In contrast, overdevelopment signifies to
ecologists—e.g., Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1972 (listed among
references for Ch. 12), pp. 418-420—a level of
technological development that disregards physical and biological
limitations and requires "far too large a slice of the
world's resources to maintain our way of life."

from William Catton Overshoot: The Ecological Basis
of Revolutionary Change. Copyright 1982 by Board of Trustees of
the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the
University of Illinois Press.

To learn about overshoot and the coming die off:
OVERSHOOT by Catton, 1982, University of Illinois Press.
Phone: 800-545-4703; FAX: 217-244-8082

To learn out about the coming energy crash and die off:
BEYOND OIL, by Gever, et al., 1991, University Press of
Colorado, 303-530-5337